Dan Simmons - Drood

“We shall be so glad to be back in Gad’s Hill Place,” Mamie said suddenly as she finished flouncing her wilted skirts and setting damp bodice lace to a semblance of propriety.

“Oh, you’re leaving the Milner Gibson house so soon? I was under the impression that Charles had leased it for a longer period.”

“Only until the first of June. Father is very impatient to get back to Gad’s Hill for the summer. He wants us to be there with the house all opened up and happy and us all settled by the second or third of June. He shall have very little reason to come into town then, for the rest of the summer, you know. The rail travel is so hard on Father these days, Wilkie. Also, it will be easier for Ellen to visit there than it has been here in the city.”

I blinked at this and then took off my spectacles to wipe them on one of the soggy handkerchiefs in order to hide my reaction.

“Miss Ternan still visits there?” I said offhandedly.

“Oh, yes, Ellen has been a regular visitor over the past few years—certainly your brother or Katey has told you that, Wilkie! Come to think of it, it’s odd that you haven’t been a guest there during the periods that Ellen has come to stay. But then—you are so busy!”

“Yes,” I said.

So Ellen Ternan was still a frequent guest at Gad’s Hill. This was a surprise. I was sure that Dickens had sworn his daughters into secrecy on this—another reason for Society to shun all of them—but that light-headed Mamie had forgotten. (Or assumed that I was still such a close friend of her father’s that he would have told me.)

I realised at that moment that none of us—none of Dickens’s friends or family or even his biographers in some future era such as yours, Dear Reader—would ever know the real story of his strange relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. Had they actually buried a child in France, as I had surmised after overhearing that one snippet of conversation between them at Peckham Station? Were they now living merely as brother and sister, their passion—should they ever have acted on it in the first place—put behind them forever? Or had that passion resumed in a new form, edging towards being made public—perhaps a very scandalous divorce and second marriage for the ageing novelist? Would Charles Dickens ever find that happiness with a woman that had seemed to elude him throughout his passionate, naive, romance-haunted life?

The novelist in me was curious. The rest of me did not give a d— n for the answers. The old friend in me vaguely wished that Dickens had found that happiness in his lifetime. The rest of me recognised that Dickens’s lifetime needed to be over and that he needed to be gone —missing, lost, expunged, eradicated, his corpse never found—so that the adulatory mobs could not bury him in Westminster Abbey or its churchyard. That was very important.

Mamie was babbling on about something—going on about someone she had danced and flirted with at the Queen’s Ball—but suddenly the coach stopped and I peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw the Marble Arch.

“I shall walk you to your door,” I said, stepping out and waiting to help the silly spinster down.

“Oh, Wilkie,” she said, taking my hand, “you truly are the kindest of men.”

I WAS WALKING home alone from the Adelphi Theatre several nights after this chance meeting when someone or something hissed at me from a darkened alley.

I stopped, turned, and lifted my bronze-headed walking stick as any gentleman would do when threatened by a ruffian in the night.

“Misster Collinssss,” hissed the figure in the narrow aperture.

Drood, I thought. My heartbeat raced and my pulse pounded in my temples. I felt frozen, unable to run. I grasped the stick in both hands.

The dark shape took two steps closer to the opening of the alley but did not emerge fully into the light. “Mister Collinsss… it’s I, Reginald Barrisss.” He gestured me closer.

I would not enter the alley, but from the opening to that stinking black crevice, I could see a trapezoid of light from the distant streetlamp falling on the dark form’s face. There was the same dirt, the same wild beard, the same hooded eyes of a hunted man always flicking one way then another. I saw only a glimpse of his teeth in the dim light, but they appeared to have decayed. The once handsome and confident and burly Detective Reginald Barris had become this shadowy, fearful form whispering at me from an alley.

“I thought you dead,” I whispered.

“I am not far from it,” said the shadow-figure. “They hunt me everywhere. They do not give me time to ssleep or eat. I musst move consstantly.”

“What news do you have?” I demanded. I still held my heavy stick at the ready.

“Drood and his minionss have set a date on which to take your friend Dickenss,” he hissed at me. His breath was foul, even from three feet away. I realised that his missing teeth must be causing this Droodish hiss.

“When?”

“Nine June. Not quite three weeks from now.”

The fifth anniversary, I thought. It made sense. I asked, “What do you mean they will take him? Kill him? Kidnap him? Take him down to Undertown?”

The filthy figure shrugged. He pulled his tattered hat brim lower so that his face went back to darkness.

I said, “What shall I do?”

“You can warn him,” rasped Barris. “But there iss no place he can hide—no country where he would be ssafe. Once Drood decidesss a thing, it is done. But perhapsss you can tell Dickensss to get his affairss in order.”

My pulse still raced. “Can I do anything for you? ”

“No,” said Barris. “I am a dead man.”

Before I could ask anything else, the dark figure backed away and then seemed to be melting down into the filthy stones of the alley. There must have been a basement stairway there that I could not see, but to my eye the shadowy figure simply melted vertically out of sight in the dark alley until it was gone.

Nine June. But how to arrange things with Dickens myself before that date? He would be back at Gad’s Hill Place soon, and we were both working hard on our respective novels. How could I lure him away—especially to where I needed to take him—so that I could do what I had to? And before the ninth of June, that anniversary of Staplehurst that Dickens had always set aside in order to meet with Drood?

I had written a formal and rather cold letter to Wills demanding the reversion of copyrights for all of my stories and novels that had ever appeared in All the Year Round, and Dickens himself wrote me back in that last week of May 1870.

Even the business part of the letter was surprisingly friendly—he assured me that papers were being drawn up at that moment and that, even though we had not contractually arranged such returns of copyright, all such rights were to be returned to me at once. But it was his brief peroration that seemed wistful, almost lonely.

“My dear Wilkie,” he wrote, “I don’t come to see you because I don’t want to bother you. Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?”

This was perfect.

I immediately wrote Dickens a friendly note asking if we could meet “at your earliest convenience, but preferably before the anniversary you honour each year at this time.” If Dickens did not burn this note, as was his habit, this wording might prove sufficiently cryptic to anyone who read it later.

When a warm and affirmative response came back from Dickens by the first of June, I completed the last of my preparations and set the Act III finale into motion.

Where am I?